


The Seas Incarnadine

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gaslighting, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Maybe Sauron has a point, Poor Life Choices, Psychological Horror, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 21:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6394735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duty drove Maedhros from Valinor. For duty he forged his father's swords and swore his oath and fought for him upon the docks of Alqualondë. For duty he let him burn the ships and his brother with them. For duty he went to treat with Morgoth. For duty he endures. </p><p>It was never a choice. </p><p>He has to keep believing that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Seas Incarnadine

“I have a game for you.”

Maedhros blinked against the sudden light. “Is it chess? I loathe chess.” It was only a week into his imprisonment and he had not yet learnt to curb his tongue.

“I’m not a monster.” Sauron’s teeth were very white and his smile showed every last one of them. “No, I’m conducting some research and I’d appreciate your aid.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course.” He held out his hand.

Maedhros got to his feet without aid despite the clumsy weight of his fetters. He could refuse to follow but, even assuming Sauron would not force him, he would be left in the filth and monotony of a cell too small to lay down in. This was a chance to gather information he could bring back to his brothers, to find some way to regain his freedom. He had still thought escape was possible then.

He shuffled out into the corridor, joints creaking with disuse. Sauron glided before him, his robes rippled behind him like the tail of of a great snake - it occurred to Maedhros that perhaps they weren’t robes at all, perhaps there were no legs beneath.

“Do you want to check?” Sauron asked over his shoulder. He could pluck thoughts from unwary minds as easily as plums from a tree and Maedhros frowned and looked away, down at his own bare feet.

The air was blood-warm and heavy with a grit that clung to his skin and lined his lungs. The walls of the Enemy’s fortress were stained grey with it, as were his servants, as was Maedhros himself. Only Sauron, radiant in white-gold robes, was unmarked. He and, of course, the Silmarils that burnt in Morgoth’s crown. Within his chest, the oath twisted at the thought of them and he forced them from his mind.

 _Left. Third door on the right. A downwards incline. Left. Stairs. Left. Left. Left_. He counted out the turns and landmarks but the passages twisted impossibly, turning back on themselves in ways that made no sense. He had not eaten since his capture and they had given him only a little water but he was sure that his disorientation was not wholly due to that.

The door they finally stopped before was modest wood banded with iron and inspired little awe. Opened it revealed a room that was large and low ceilinged, lit by the glow of iron braziers; it reminded him of his father’s forge. Many of the tools laid out were familiar, if more delicately wrought. They would have to be; these were not for the reshaping of metal but flesh.

Maedhros told himself that he was unsurprised and unafraid. He had become adept at lying to himself in recent years but not so adept as to keep fear from closing up his throat. He swallowed past it and did his best to keep the terror from his face.

He must have done a bad job of it all the same. “You needn’t look so frightened,” Sauron said. “Nothing shall be done to you that you do not ask for.”

His father would not have let himself be cowed. “And if I ask that you return our stolen jewels and set me free?”

“That’s not within my power to grant, little king. Will you sit?” The chairs were heavy iron, bolted to the floor, and there were straps by which an occupant might be secured in place.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stand.”

“As you wish.” Sauron turned away and Maedhros, careful of the clatter of his chains, trying not to _think_ about what he was doing, snatched a scalpel from the nearest rack. He tucked it into his sleeve, the metal cold against his forearm.

There was a sheet spread over one of the tables, concealing something bulky. It was the wrong shape for a body, Maedhros thought, but then Sauron snatched away the covering with a conjurer's flourish and he saw he had been both right and wrong. Bodies usually had limbs.

“Do you know him?” Sauron asked.

It had been but a week. A week in which Maedhros had fretted and starved and rued every mistake he’d ever made but, most of all, been bored. It had seemed to last a hundred years or more.

How much longer then for the figure upon the table before him?

“Yes,” he said at last, when he could trust his voice not to break. “Yes, I know him.” He could hardly hide that from Sauron. Or from himself for was Eiliant not here, not _ruined_ for Maedhros’ sake?

Eiliant who had been stable master in Formenos and taught him to ride his first pony. Who had killed Teleri without flinching and then wept over the horses drowned in the ships shattered by Ulmo’s wrath. Who had insisted on giving apples from their shrinking stores to their steeds before they left upon their last, foolish ride. He would not ride again.

Sauron was staring at his face, as intent as a hunting cat. “We have a few more of them stashed away. It would have been wasteful to kill them all.”

“Who? Who lives?” He sounded too desperate. He forced his face into a mask of unconcern.

Sauron flapped a hand vaguely. “What do I care for their names? You will see them all in time. Now, as I said, there is research to conduct and a subject is required. This one has served well enough and can continue to do so. But I thought to offer you a choice - you come from a scientifically minded family after all and you might care to be involved. As his monarch - and since he isn’t feeling very talkative - it’s your prerogative.”

“That’s your game?” said Maedhros. “It’s not a very good one.”

“More an experiment, I suppose,” Sauron said agreeably. “I’ll admit, our understanding of Eldar psychology leaves much to be desired. If the Valar had known you better perhaps this messy rebellion business could have been avoided. Just think, you could be safe at home with your mother, even now. Your father might yet live. Your little brother. This poor soldier might be whole.”

“Tragic.” He did not let himself look at Eiliant or dwell on the images the words stirred but from his smirk the maia saw them regardless.

“I hope you see that what we’re doing here is for the greater good. We can make things so much neater, so much more orderly. Think how much pain could be avoided if we _understood_ each other properly.”

“Think,” Maedhros said, hand barely kept from twitching for the blade hidden in his sleeve, “how much pain could be avoided if you stopped torturing people.”

Sauron laughed. “You have a very limited perspective. Now choose.”

The High King of the Noldor raised his head to meet the maia’s eyes. “You know little of us indeed,” he said with all the scorn that he could muster, “if you think that is a _choice_.”

***

Grandfather Finwë hadn’t liked to talk about Cuiviénen and the journey west. He had made a good many speeches extolling the strength and courage of those that survived the long march, their gratitude to the Valar that had delivered them, but had neatly skimmed over the horror, the exhaustion, the uncertainty.

The children of Tirion - Maedhros, his friends, his brothers and cousins - would reenact the Great Journey, in secret so that adults who remembered the real one would not scold them for it. They stalked each other through pleasure gardens and parks, armed with stick-swords and spears, ‘orcs’ dragging the unwary away and forcing them to eat spiders or roll in dung. When their parents called they would run home bruised and dirty and blissfully ignorant.

There was a spider weaving above him in the corner of his cell. He was considering eating it.

If he had been stronger, fought harder, he might have died before they took him. His grandfather had defied Morgoth to his final breath, his father had fallen, undaunted, facing insurmountable odds. He would die by inches in the dark, mutilated and defiled, and his family would never know what had become of him.

He no longer looked Sauron in the eye when the maia came to him and asked him who would suffer. It was harder every time - he was weaker, he _knew_ the pain and indignity he was inviting and Eiliant did not move or speak or seem to care - but what else could he do? It was what duty demanded. Just as it had demanded that he forge his father's swords. That he follow him into exile. That he swear and kill and let him burn the ships and brother with them. 

It was duty that kept the knife hidden in his sleeve.

Sauron had let him take it. He could not delude himself on that count.

Even so it was comforting to sit in the darkness of his cell and hold it, his life cupped in his hands. A key to freedom if he chose to use it. But it was not a choice. He’d sworn an oath and the promise stayed his hand.

The spider was a large one, fat and onyx as the gems they had once worked. It was probably poisonous. He ate it anyway; it tasted like bile and fragments of carapace got stuck between his teeth and in the empty sockets where teeth had been. It did nothing to sate his hunger.

He wished he were still in Valinor. He wished he’d never fought upon the docks or let them burn the boats or sworn his father’s stupid, awful oath. He wished he could have died better.

Most of all he wished he had another spider.

***

“I think I’ve been going about this all wrong,” said Sauron, putting down the pliers. “You’re enjoying this.”

“Enjoying?” His speech was mangled into unintelligibility by his bruised lips and the blood in his mouth but Sauron took the meaning from his mind.

“A poor choice of words. But you can’t deny it pleases you to defy me. You feel righteous in your suffering. _Kingly_.”

“You’re welcome,” he slurred, “to stop at any time.”

“As are you, little king. You are doing this to yourself; that is the point.” Sauron unbuckled the straps that held his arms in place, touch incongruously gentle against flesh he had so recently been abusing.

With Sauron’s help he stood and staggered to the table Eiliant was laid out on. He looked no better than he had that first day but nor did he look worse. There was a ball of rags stuffed between his teeth - he woke on occasion and Sauron found the noises that he made monotonous.

“Courage,” Maedhros said, not bothering to whisper - Sauron would know anyway. “I will free you yet.” A lie, told more for his own sake than that of Eiliant who was beyond the reach of words.

Sauron snorted. “Perhaps I was foolish to let you make yourself a martyr. Perhaps if I were to take our limbless friend and some other of your people and ask you to choose between them?”

He tried not to let his breath catch. “I won’t make a choice like that.” Against his arm, within his sleeve, the scalpel felt cold enough to burn.

“Inaction is a choice. Would you choose for them both to suffer?”

On that count he was right. Maedhros had the knife. He was unrestrained and the maia stood across from him, unarmed. This would not stop for any of them unless he stopped it.

The fire in him, his father’s legacy, demanded that he fight and damn the consequences.

 _Kill him_ , he thought with all his might. _Kill him. Strike now_. Sauron’s grin widened and Maedhros knew he had been heard.

But he was his mother’s son also and he knew bitter practicality as well as senseless defiance. He turned and plunged the blade into his soldier’s neck and dragged it across, cartilage and bone sending shudders up his arm. Hot blood splashed his hand, his face, and he prayed the wound was mortal.

There was no need for prayer; killing was easy once you had the knack. Eiliant gurgled, once, and stilled.

Maedhros drew back the knife and raised it up - swiftly, swiftly, he would not get a second chance, Sauron would not allow it, the _oath_ would not allow it - but before it could pierce his own throat Sauron was behind him, pinning his arms, pressing their bodies together close as lovers.

He plucked the knife from his hand and dropped it to the floor with a clatter.

“Ill done, little king. Murdering your subjects? What _would_ your grandfather say?” He tried to disguise it but for the first time Maedhros heard something other than vague amusement in Sauron’s voice. He was angry.

“Very little,” Maedhros hissed through gritted teeth, feeling something close to triumph. “Did you forget? Your master crushed his skull.” He snapped his head back into the maia’s face but he might as well have tried to headbutt a wall for all the notice Sauron took.

He kicked, trying for the knees, the groin, but perhaps his earlier speculation had been correct for his feet connected with nothing beneath the robe.

Sauron sighed and let him go. He stumbled, dropped to his knees reaching for the knife but Sauron kicked it aside. “Think of your dignity,” he said chidingly. “It does not behoove you to throw tantrums like a child.” He drew back his arm and brought it around, open-handed, the lazy swat of a housecat toying with a mouse.

The blow sent him skidding across the floor, leaving a long red smear of Eiliant’s blood. His ears rang with it the force of it and his mouth filled up with the taste of iron and shards of something hard. There was no pain but when he tried to close his mouth, his jaw moved strangely and the wrongness of it all was enough to make his vision spark and dim. He tried to swallow and found he couldn’t and let his head sag down so that blood and spit drooled from his mouth to add to the mess upon the floor.

He might have fainted. The blood on his skin was dry and tacky by the time he could raise his head.

Sauron was sat beside him, robes unmarked. “Why do you do this to yourself?” he asked sadly.

***

He was not sure how long it had been. Time had ceased to matter.

All he knew was that it was the first time Sauron had not come to fetch him himself. It was orcs that flung open the door to his cell and yanked him out into the comparative brightness of the corridor.

“I can walk,” he told them in Quenya and then shakey Sindarin but they did not understand or did not listen and dragged him by his hair and the chains about his neck.

He had rarely seen living orcs so close, and never while not locked in desperate combat. Two of them were male and the other had once been a woman. Their faces were as grey as anything else in Angband, marked with lines and whorls of livid scar tissue. Long - too long - of limb, their movements were abrupt and near too fast to follow, interspersed with sudden stillness. In their beetle-black armour they reminded him of insects.

Bound and injured as he was he could not fight them - even speech was painful - but he had been a politician before he ever was a soldier and they had been people once.

“You don’t have to obey him,” he said, hating the desperation in his voice but unable to entirely stifle it. “You don’t have to be slaves, whatever has been done to you, whatever you have done there can be an end to it. Help me and my people will welcome you with open arms, you can be free and safe if only you will-”

At a gesture from the tallest orc they halted. It turned to him and smiled. Its lips had been split up to the hinges of its jaw, exposing a horrifying quantity of yellowed tooth and blackened gum, and he recoiled as much as their hold allowed.

“ _Liar_ ,” it said, in perfect Quenya, in the accents of Tirion. Its breath was fetid with its last meal and underneath was something stranger, sweet and musty as old cobwebs.

It patted his cheek - gently but even that sent agony shooting through his jaw - and turned away.

He did not speak again until they reached Sauron’s chambers.

The maia looked up from the engraved silver thumbscrews he was dissembling, his eyes as brightly curious as ever. “Ah, Caramben. Thank you.”

The name was familiar but his mind was too fogged for him to say why. The one that had him by the hair released him and he barely kept himself from going sprawling. He struggled to his feet, gathering up what shreds of dignity remained to him. “What are you hoping to achieve here? You’ve asked no questions about our strategies or dispositions. Your master has taken no interest. What is the _point_ of any of this?”

Sauron smiled at some private joke. “You’re right that your soldiers were forthcoming enough. We know all there is to know.”

“Then why?”

“Redemption.”

“As your master was offered? You shall not find it.”

“Not mine, little king. Yours.” One of the orcs - Caramben, apparently - had circled around to stand at Sauron’s left shoulder and he reached out to pet it, ruffling its hair like a dog. “It is a poor monarch that does not know his own subjects. Especially when they have been so very loyal and suffered so very much on his behalf.”

 _Caramben_.

He knew them then, all three.

The colour had leeched from their skin and their eyes were dark, the light of the trees all swallowed up. Still he knew them.

Dúlinnel, who had been their lookout, who had loved to watch the strange, new birds of Beleriand, stared at nothing with her one remaining eye. Faerthurin who had danced with him on the lakeshore with an easy, flowing grace, now moving with the jitter-stop of poorly made clockwork. And Caramben who had a wife, a daughter - what would he _tell_ them - leant into Sauron’s touch and smiled his awful smile.

“ _No._ ”

“Well really, what did you _think_ happened to them? You were their king. And this is the end you led them to. I hope you are ashamed.”

“You did this. _You_ tortured them, _you_ broke them, Caramben, all of you, I am sorry, _so sorry_ -”

“Do you think an apology will mend the wrong that you have done them? There is only one thing you can offer now that they desire. _Catharsis_.”

“Your will, lord?” said what had once been Dúlinnel.

“Do not kill him,” Sauron said. “Elsewise do as you see fit.”

***

He regained consciousness by inches. He was lying upon stone, head cradled in someone’s lap and for a moment he couldn’t remember whose or why. Nothing hurt, though he wasn’t sure why he thought it should. There were fingers running through his hair, gentle over the tangles and for one blissful moment he thought it was his mother, waking him from some nightmare.

“Don’t weep, little king.”

Maedhros had not known that he was. The chains were gone but when he tried to raise his head the maia’s fingers caught in his hair keeping him pinned. He struggled anyway and Sauron’s hands withdrew, letting all the pain he hadn’t been feeling come rushing over him. It was overwhelming, so much that he could barely pinpoint the individual causes; the broken wrist, his ruined jaw, the wrenching twist of something torn inside him standing like trees above a rush of floodwater.

“You mustn’t blame me for this,” Sauron said gently as he moaned and thrashed. “Everything that has happened to you springs from your own choices. I would keep you from harm if you would only let me.” He caught him again, pinning his flailing limbs, and the pain fell away like the receding tide.

It was some time before he could form an answer. “No. That’s not- This is your fault.”

“ _My_ fault? How many did you kill at Alqualondë?”

“Six,” he said or thought. Two disembowelled and one run through, a shattered skull, an arm hacked free, one pushed and swallowed by the night-dark sea. He didn’t remember their faces and regretted it as much as he was grateful for it. They had sanded the decks afterwards but the white wood had stayed red.

“ _Six_. Does poor whatever his name was make seven? Or will you count him against your total? Of course, it _isn’t_ seven. Or six. Or five if we’re being generous. You are - or were - a king and the death of every man and woman you commanded is upon your hands.”

“They chose. To follow me.”

“They followed your father. And then he died and you were what was left. He was mad and foolish to the last but he wrote his name in fire upon the history of this world. How will they remember you, little king? Will they remember you at all? Your brothers were named for skills and talents but _you_ were named for a pretty face and the order of your birth.” His fingers traced the lines of Maedhros’ shattered cheekbone. “A pity about the former. Really my master is doing your people a favour, keeping you here where you can do no further damage to their cause. Your brothers certainly think so; there has been no reply to our offers to negotiate, no attempt at rescue.”

Were those Sauron’s words or his own? He had thought them often enough in the darkness of his cell. “No.”

“You have murdered and betrayed and _failed_ and you deserve no less than this. You know it to be so.”

He had enjoyed rhetoric once, upon the cool stone terraces of his grandfather’s court, the tricks and traps and cleverness, arguments deployed like bright swords, cutting to the heart of a matter. None of that was left to him. His words and wits had deserted him and he could give no answer. He had led them and they had died or worse. Wasn't it that simple?

“But there can be an end to it. My master is wise and forgiving and in service you may find absolution. Surrender yourself to me. Be free of your obligations and your guilt.”

He was so tired, so cold, so hurt and he scarcely remembered what he was arguing against.

“What say you?” Sauron leant in closer, eyes alight

His family were dead, betrayed or lost to him forever. He had failed his people. He had failed in his duty. What else was left?

 _An oath_. He felt it wake within him, closing off his throat against whatever else he might have said. He would have wept but his father’s words had burnt his tears away. His choices and his life were not his own; they never had been.

And so Maedhros spat into that golden face, red blood and black phlegm against the smooth perfection of its cheek. Some of it went in his eyes but the Maia did not blink it away. He never blinked; he saw through other means than those.

“Poor boy,” Sauron said sadly. “Poor, foolish boy. Do you think you can draw strength from _that_? It will break you just as surely, only slower.” He wiped the worst of the blood from Maedhros’ face with the stainless sleeve of his robe and then cocked his head, affecting thoughtfulness. “Yes, I think it will suit our purpose very well. We can even pretend, since it gives you comfort, that you have no other choice. Now, how would you like to see the stars again?”

The shackle closed about his right wrist and the pain came rushing back. He might have screamed.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a semi-prequel to [For the sake of prisoners](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6036628/chapters/13842238), though both stories can be read independent of each other. 
> 
> I'm on tumblr in the [obvious place](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com)!


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